Cracked.com is incredibly informative and entertaining, but I have to admit that I would hardly consider it academic. The above article points out something we haven’t discussed in class yet which is the media’s affect on male body image. This article is about a year and a half old and focuses on how the media portrays men as overly buff, tanned and hairless. However, now I want to make an argument that the media is portraying extremely thin male models. This portrayal is in a very certain demographic and is certainly not the majority but its still an issue. For me it appears that media hasn’t improved its portrayal of people but instead evened the playing field for eating disorders.

Would this level playing field be considered progress? For me it appears that the media only ever deals in extremes. Never depicting something “average.” I’m finding that media outlets rarely reflect the world as is, because thats not interesting. Maybe we are drawn to media that shows extremes because it contrasts our reality. Would an advertisement that looks like what we see everyday be all that interesting? Probably not.

I agree that there has definitely been an increase in unrealistic ads targeted towards men. However, I wouldn’t call this progress because no one should have to go through body image issues. Gendered advertising brings about a negative outcome for both men and women. For women even more so, as it mentions in the Cracked article 25% of men are experiencing eating disorders. I don’t know how accurate this statistic is but that still means 75% of them are women, which is still the majority. It would be interesting to see if the number of men affected will increase as advertisers expand their target market and our daily exposure to media increases.
In regards to “average” people in advertisements, there have been advertisements, in which there were more realistic depictions of people like the Dove Ad we talked about in class. Also recently Uniqlo had an advertising campaign titled “Made for All”, http://www.uniqlo.com/nyc/voices/ andhttp://www.uniqlo.com/us/corp/pressrelease/2011/09/people_campaign_cast.html , which made an effort to include a variety of native New Yorkers ranging from musicians to heads of non-profit organizations serving the local community. However, this may be just a way for them to ingratiate themselves with New Yorkers and to expand into a new market. Perhaps they’ll abandon their “Made for All” philosophy for their next advertising campaign.